Dear Sweden or Finland or wherever:
Thanks so much for sending along the handsome coaster. Please forgive us for taking so long to send our regards, but we'd really only been living here for a few weeks when it showed up, and we were a little unsure what to do with the thing.
I'm just an intern here, and new on the job, so I don't get to decide anything. But there was something spiffy-looking about the package the little gold candy dish -- or whatever it is supposed to be -- came in, and I couldn't help myself, and kept fishing it out of the trash no matter how many Czars came by my desk and round-filed it while yelling at me to get back to editing Rush Limbaugh's Wikipedia page.
I asked Adele, the girl that's been here the longest, what I should do with your merit badge, but she told me that anything that showed up for our first year here, whether it's an oil painting, a North Korean nuke, or a recession, should just get forwarded to the Texan fellow that used to live here, because nothing could be really addressed to us yet. Our new boss is still trying to finish up some work he had left over when he quit his job as a Chicago Alderman or something, and he's in Denmark at a trade show, still handing out his old business cards until they run out. Adele's old and still an intern, and the catty girls say she couldn't even get Clinton to grope her, so I just sort of brushed it off and kept the neato emblem thing here.
It says here there's some kind of money that goes with your disk with the picture of Andrew Sullivan on it, but that makes me sort of suspicious. 1.4 million dollars it says here, but maybe that's a typo and you guys meant yen or kronos or Canadian dollars or those big stone rings or whatever you guys use instead of real money with Presidents on it. I'm sorry, you sound like nice people, but it smacks of a "You May Already Be A Winner" letter that's addressed to: Occupant. My mom told me Ed McMahon is dead, and the days of a man showing up at your house with a big cardboard check for no reason are long past, and we should all be suspicious of anyone that promises you money for doing nothing. Besides, ever since we hired Acorn to do the census, we had to keep way more than that in small unmarked bills in my desk, and I don't want you sending me any more. There's barely room for my Carmex, Post-It notes, and all my Apple gear as it is.
Tell you what: why don't you split up the money and send a little to every person in America. None of us are good at math here, so I'm not sure how much that would be, exactly. I even asked my only friend here, little Timmy from Treasury, to figure it out, but he says carrying the zeros gets him every time. Timmy's nice and told me not to worry about the exact figure, somehow the President will end up with every penny of it eventually.
Thanks so much,
Amanda from the secretarial pool.
